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Everything posted by raeshlavik

Thanks.
The EK - campaign worlds really strike me as Norse Mythology based, where the armies of Odin hang out in Asgard (an EK) and booze it up between sorties into the lower worlds (campaigns) where they duke it out with the armies of the Trolls or whatnot.
So it seems fun to me to mirror this and create drunken days of celebration for especially amazing battles.

In the risk of overusing the ever popular "this"...
This.
If you zoom out to the 10,000 foot view - there is no single design element of CF that does not promote player activity in some fashion, typically with PvP as the design target.
I simply cannot believe that the one element of the design, EKs, are missing this - which they are right now.
I also cannot believe that the business model, which right now looks to be selling EK 'stuff', is hinging on the one design element that is so radically different from the rest of the game.
Therefore I choose to believe that we just don't know how it works yet, and Occam's Razor states that EKs will end up being similar in design scope as the rest of the game.

Events are fine and dandy, but most of this crowd simply won't stop placing their booted foot on the chest of their fallen enemy to remove their weapon long enough to go help Santa find the Easter Bunny who is lost in Halloween Land.
People will be marking the passage of time by when the campaign world they were just playing for 90 days crumbles and they head back to the EKs with phat loot.
As an RPer, I get the desire for events - but I also know the general audience really could not care less.
So what I will be doing is creating events in my EK that marks significant victories of my people, or possibly coming up with my own festive whatevers to blend RL with CF. But I do not expect ACE to have to spend time, effort, and money on 'fluff' that few will ever care about.

My group is currently assembling and planning, with the assumption that the EKs will be a Game of Thrones sort of deal and have intrinsic importance to the game. There's just too much hinted at with them for them to be simple player housing... Why make each one the size of a campaign world, with PvE content, and hinge the business model on population caps and parcels, if there wasn't something to it all...
My long-time warmaster is onboard and just picked up the Sapphire tier. He's run the military end of things for like eight years now, and will be managing the military aspects of our EK and campaign efforts. Alpha and Beta will be training the folks we have and recruiting those we think have promise, and with the assumption they will be done lighting people on fire in AA and TESO by some time in 2016, we will just transition to live in CF with everything already operational.
I would really like to get some concrete information on EKs, Commerce, Crafting, Materials, Shops, Banks, Vendors, and everything else if I am going to do here what I do in Eve... But I assume that will roll out over time.

I agree with you, but having run this sort of thing in Eve for well on an eternity now, I want to know if I can correlate EKs with stations.
I own several stations, stations bank items/materials and produce things like ships and guns, which I then provide to the corp at cost and allies at discounts. Given the locations of my stations, I have the ability to apply pressure on other alliances to either supply them against common foes, or cut them off and starve them out if the need presents itself.
Also, given location, I make pretty good coin acquiring materials from independents and small corps, which is then converted into product and resold.
These stations can also be attacked, so my stranglehold on systems can be argued by the locals, and should they rise up against me, I need to defend my interests typically by erasing them to the pilot. How I do this is by maintaining trade and political relations with other corps who I can call upon to aid me.
This is the sort of PvP I participate in, allowing my corp and alliance to be better at the more face-to-face shooting at each other.

Just a little bit more information on how the EK realms work please... I'm close to switching from Ruby to Emerald - but I want to know how EK works from a guild leader POV.
What does it do for us? What can we do with it? I assume manufacturing and sales? Banking? What element(s) of the EK generate(s) traffic?
If each parcel is an acre, and the Ruby tier is 20 acres - that's actually pretty big... My Secondlife regions are 16 acres square, and I can build an entire city on one of those pretty easy.
For anyone curious, this is 16 virtual acres:
Each building there is a full-scale 2-storey house or storefront. For scale, the round thing in the center of the image is 20 meters across - 60 feet.

Guild size tends to be self-regulating based on leadership skill... You just don't see huge twitchTV zombie guilds lasting very long, because the cult of personality isn't enough to sustain it once things heat up.
As soon as pressure is applied, where the unit needs to respond in a cohesive precise manner - they fold.
Even in Eve, the giant alliances are immensely fluid with smaller corps coming and going constantly. Sure, you do get things like GoonSwarm, but they're externally held together and a bit of a special case.
The guilds you need to really look out for are the 10-20 person guilds that have been together for 5 or 10 years... Those are the ones that tend to really rule to roost in the more brutal settings.

So much panic over big guilds rolling little guilds...
Two things:
If you are the little guy, swallow your pride and take a knee - ally with one of the bigger guilds and the worry vanishes.
Big guilds are no guarantee of anything but a temporary win-state. The bigger they get, the more internal forces tear them apart. Play some Eve to see how this works.
Exhibit A: https://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Interstellar_Alcohol_Conglomerate_(Player_alliance)

Definitely something to look out for.
I would be likewise worried, if not for the fact ACE's basic design allows them to alter the 'rules' as needed. If Uncle Bob becomes too much of a badass, they will adjust a few cosmic knobs to bring things back into a more competitive light.

I'm sure it will happen just like that... Nations combining forces and roflstomping their contemporaries was kind of a daily thing in SB after all.
And it will even work on occasion.
But once folks start to figure out the political landscape though - that's when the crazy starts to happen. Nations being torn apart by the internal machinations of planted moles and spies, better offers under the table that result in sudden coups, other nations banding together, Mercenaries from the Dregs paid to shovel the bodies of opposing forces into dumpsters...
Good lord, I can't wait...

The thing we need to look at, truly, is the way CF is designed. IF this becomes a problem, ACE twiddles a few 'knobs' on the campaign setups to equalize the issue for a few new campaign types, and people will migrate there...
SELECT * FROM user_base WHERE guild_victory_count <= 5;
And done.

Yep. I was more referring to 'these days'. Sorry. Like the infamous GW2 blobs...
But 'managed' is the key to not being a true zerg. Zerging is combat by Brownian motion - overwhelming the objective simply by pressure of bodies.

It appears that, based on a few bits of information here in pre-alpha, that joining a campaign locks you to said campaign. And there are intended to be a lot of simultaneous campaigns. Sooo - if the Goons are in let's say "world A" - don't go there. Go to "world B".

Which side of the zerg fence you are on depends entirely on your guild status.
In a great guild that does stuff? Zergs are talentless masses of warm bodies that exist to screw with your day.
Not in a great guild that does stuff? Zergs are the only way to live long enough in PvP against guilds to have a good time.
In this, I am neither for - nor against. I simply believe that the mechanics that create zergs in the first place should be analyzed and fixed. If we find that there are huge roving blobs of scrubs trampling the landscape all the time - we need to look at the grouping mechanics to see if there is a way of breaking them into smaller chunks that get to know one another.

I'm guessing the gender thing is simply a money thing. It costs cash to make, texture, rig, and animate - and even more money to make a zillion bits of armor fit all body types.
While I, personally, would love to see each of the races have everything needed to be actual races - meaning genders, unique architecture, unique armor and weapons, racial quirks and foibles and whatnot because it adds depth to the setting - I'm not sure it is the highest and best use of funds and time.
Conversely - we are in pre-alpha and there is 1.5-ish years still ahead of us. A lot can change.

This early in development I'm not sure why folks are so freaked out.
They clearly state in every video, screen shot, what have you that is it pre-alpha and it *will* change. That and given the interest of ACE in appealing to folks by giving options - my money is on there being a UI setting for it.
If'n you don't like it - turn it off. If'n you DGAF, kill the guy busy fiddling with his UI.